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Following on from my earlier posts about emulation here comes part 3. This time the focus is on emulation of handheld gaming systems on your PC; by which I mean Nintendo Gameboy, Atari Lynx and so on. So let’s start with the “biggy” here: Nintendo’s Gameboy. As you will no doubt be aware the Gameboy comes in a variety of “flavours”:

• Nintendo Gameboy: The original classic, monochrome screen and more games than you can shake a stick at. How many people have owned one of these classics ? Classic games include: Tetris, various Final Fantasy titles and of course Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening (the first Zelda game I ever played !) Here’s a screenshot of one in “action” on my desktop running Zelda on the Visual Boy Advance emulator:

• Nintendo Gameboy Colour/Color: Yes you guessed it, same as a Gameboy but in colour.  Nintendo re-released Legend Of Zelda Link’s Awakening in colour to coincide with the new system (I believe it had a couple of extra dungeons in the game as well, perhaps Mike can confirm this ?)  Here’s the colour Zelda again running on the Visual Boy Advance emulator:

• Nintendo Gameboy Advance: In three formats, the regular Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP and Gameboy Micro.  A much more technically advanced system, reflected in the graphics and sound quality of the games.  The system is backwards compatible with Gameboy and Gameboy Colour/Color.  This system also saw a flourishing “demo” scene and many demos were written for the system and even video clips (Family Guy, Simpsons etc) converted to play on the Gameboy Advance. I’m an RPG fan (no ? really ?) so the classic titles for me were Golden Sun, Legend of Zelda Minish Cap and the Final Fantasy titles. All the classic Nintendo titles are here though: Tetris, Super Mario, Harvest Moon and so on. Here’s Zelda and a demo running on Visual Boy Advance emulator:

So what about Nintendo’s current offering, the DS/dual screen ?  Well that’s catered for as well. No$GBA is a Gameboy Advance emulator which also runs SOME DS titles on Windows.

So moving on from Nintendo. There are other handheld gaming system manufacturers and whilst Nintendo has been dominant in this area they haven’t had it all their own way. Sega released the Game Gear system, essentially a handheld Sega Master System (in fact there was a converter that lets you play Master System games on the Game Gear.) Sonic The Hedgehog puts in an appearance on this platform, as well as other Sega classics such as Ecco The Dolphin and the Shining series. Dega seems to be quite a good emulator for this and here you can see Space Harrier:

Then there’s the Atari Lynx. Well known titles include Chip’s Challenge, California Games, Raiden, Hard Drivin’, Lemmings and Paperboy. The main emulator is called “Handy”, shown here running Gauntlet Third Encounter:

Any other handheld systems you can think of and there’s probably an emulator here. Only exception is the Sony PSP, and considering the PSP hardware I would imagine emulating the system on PC is a little while off, we shall see ….

Steve

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Following on from yesterday’s post about emulation here’s part #2 discussing emulation of 16 bit computer systems. You know the ones I mean: The Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, amongst others.

Years ago when Amiga was first released there was a lot of debate about whether to buy the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga; it was the Commodore 64 vs Sinclair Spectrum battle all over again …. Commodore’s offering was the first multi tasking offering on the market and technically a superior machine to the Atari offering with superior graphics and sound. Many Commodore 64 owners took to the Amiga like a duck takes to water and the Amiga saw some excellent game and demo offerings.

Amiga emulation has always proved a bit “tricky” on the PC as the system comprised of several custom chips and it uses a fair bit of processing power to emulate it well on PC. The main emulator for running your old Amiga software is WinUAE (Windows Ultimate Amiga Emulator.) It’s a bit of a bitch nuisance to set up and get running smoothly though, but you should get it going in 10 minutes. You may need find to a copy of the Amiga BIOS and operating system, a Google search will help you with this.

The best Amiga games ? Well, in my opinion:

• Defender Of The Crown – One of the original games for Amiga and a superb title. Take over feudal England and restore the monarchy. You don’t even need an emulator for this one, you can play the Flash version online right here.
• Lemmings – Oh come on, you know this game surely ? Classic Amiga puzzle platform game.
• The Secret Of Monkey Island – Classic point ‘n’ click game, shows up on PC as well.
• Frontier Elite 2 – Remember Elite from yesterday’s article on the Commodore 64 ? Well this is more of the same, better graphics etc.
• Populous – Superb God game.

And for some reason there’s quite a few pinball games on Amiga. Not surprising I guess as the Amiga had the power to do the format justice, C64 pinball games had been pretty dire.

And what of the Atari ST ?  Personally I liked the ST.  Ok, it wasn’t an Amiga (rumours were around for ages that there would be an emulator for ST on Amiga so you could play all ST software on your Amiga, it never happened) but it was still a nice system.  The operating system was Digital Research’s GEM, not dissimilar to the Amiga Workbench but not as “pretty” or as advanced. The best emulator seems to be STeem Engine which you can get from the Little Green Desktop website. The Atari ST had much the same games as the Commodore Amiga as well as the superb Goldrunner, an excellent shoot ‘em up. You can see STeem Engine running Frontier Elite 2 here:

You’ll find other emulators for 16 bit systems such as the Acorn Archimedes here.

More emulation posts to come.

Steve

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